‘The Legend of Barney Thompson’: Robert Carlyle throws a curveball

When notable actors make their directorial debuts, moviegoers steel themselves for worthiness and weighty themes. So The Legend of Barney Thompson, a riotous serial-killer comedy with the Scottish actor Robert Carlyle at the helm, is a most pleasing curveball. This is the same Robert Carlyle who honed his craft in Ken Loach's Riff-Raff and Carla's Song. For his role as a bus driver in the latter he passed a test for the PSV licence.

Method and gritty material are recurrent themes with the Glaswegian: he slept rough around Waterloo in London before playing a homeless man in Antonia Bird's Safe.

“What can I say? I’ve paid my dues in the low-key indie sector,” Carlyle, a man who has lost none of the wiry physicality of his youth, says with a laugh. “Actors do tend to take worthy projects. But this is maybe more like me than most of the other films. I love comedy. It’s what I like to watch. Even more than Ken Loach or the kill-your-granny films.”

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That's not to say killing isn't a major plot point in The Legend of Barney Thompson. The film concerns a charmless barber (Carlyle takes the titular role) who, after accidentally killing his boss, finds himself mired in a subculture defined by grotesquery and botched cover-ups. His ineptitude quickly brings him to the attention of a keen investigating copper (played by Ray Winstone). All the while Barney is chastised by his mother (Emma Thompson), a wagon of the thundering variety.

So the Oscar-winning Thompson, aged 56, is mum to Robert Carlyle, aged 54. How did that conversation go? “She read the script and accepted the role the very next day,” Carlyle says. “She said she thought it was a hoot. I’ve always been a big fan of Emma. I think she’s absolutely wonderful. Even though the part is nothing like Nanny McPhee there are some similarities, because both parts require someone with no vanity whatsoever. Emma is such a beautiful-looking woman. It takes a real actor to disguise herself in that manner. Someone who doesn’t give a shit, where most Hollywood actresses would tell you, ‘F*** off. I’m not playing that.’ ”

It’s a brilliant, unorthodox piece of casting, but we expect nothing less from an actor turned director who has always ventured down the road less travelled.

Robert Carlyle was born in Maryhill, Glasgow, where he was raised by his dad, Joseph, a painter and decorator. At 16 Robert left school to follow his father into the family trade. He entered theatre at the comparatively late age of 21, after reading Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

"When I told people what I wanted to do they all said, 'You having a f***ing laugh?' " Carlyle says. "But not my father, funny enough. He always thought I should go ahead. And years and years later – it was after I had done The World Is Not Enough – he said, 'Listen, this acting, you're doing all right, hey? Because when you started I started putting a bit of money away, in case things didn't work out. And now I don't know what to do with it.' And he produces a bank book from his pocket. There was £1,000 in it. I don't know how he managed it."

By the mid 1990s, not too long after his graduation from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Carlyle was a poster boy for a resurgent British film industry, scoring back-to-back hits with Trainspotting and The Full Monty, and popping up in Oasis videos.

“Politically, it was an interesting time,” he says. “Brit Pop and Cool Britannia and all that stuff – it kills me to use those words – but it did seem like anything was possible. So all these little films broke out. Politically, the time was right. And that carried over into movies. You might have three hit movies back to back. I don’t think it would happen with films of that scale now. But you never know. Films are just as subject to trends as clothes on the high street.”

Carlyle's earliest roles – as a multiple murderer in Cracker, the TV series starring Robbie Coltrane, and as Begbie in Trainspotting – established him as a fierce and intense screen presence. Indeed, he still gets called Begbie on the street.

"It happens more often than you'd think," he says, smiling. "Trainspotting was a huge film. And rightly so. Because Danny Boyle" – its director – "is a genius. I walked into a place in Bulgaria a couple of years ago, and all I hear is, 'Oi, Begbie!' I couldn't f***ing believe it. I thought, There's nowhere I can go in the world."

In recent years Carlyle has edged away from such angry young men and towards science fiction and fantasy, playing a dark sorcerer in Eragon (2006) and a plague survivor in 28 Weeks Later (2007), and voicing the video game Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and its sequels.

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"I definitely wanted to do something different. There was a period at the beginning of the 21st century when the kind of films that I like to make weren't really being made any more. And the ones that were being made, even though you'd put your heart into it, weren't getting seen. I made a film in 2004 called Summer, and I got paid the same as I did for Riff-Raff. The projects and budgets were getting smaller. I'd been working 20 years, and I hadn't a penny in the bank. I felt really disillusioned. So I thought, I'm going to go off and do something that people actually want to see."

In this spirit Carlyle is Vancouver-bound for the fifth series of Once Upon a Time, ABC's hit fairy-tale-themed drama, which features Carlyle as Rumpelstiltskin. It's a nine-month, 22-episode shift, and Carlyle couldn't be happier about it.

“Vancouver is a fantastic place to be for my wife and for my kids to grow up in, and that’s important for me nowadays,” the actor says. “It’s not just about greed, but it does bring financial security. I’m blessed that it’s so popular. I’ve had a few lucky breaks in film. And now I’ve had a lucky break in TV.”

Trading places: the best actors turned directors

Charlie Chaplin When the Tramp wasn't capering on camera he was directing, writing and composing for such comedy-defining flicks as City Lights, Modern Times and The Great Dictator.

Clint Eastwood At 85 Eastwood can still helm his way to the top of the box office – American Sniper made $547 million last year – and waltz off with sacks of awards. See Million Dollar Baby (2004), Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), Changeling (2008) and J Edgar (2011) for Oscar form.

Sofia Coppola Coppola might have thought twice about entering the family business when everybody decided to hold her accountable for The Godfather Part III, in which she played Mary Corleone. Happily, she dusted herself down and went on to direct The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette.

Ben Affleck Still smarting from Bennifer-era jibes and career missteps (Surviving Christmas, Gigli), Affleck bounced back with an impressive directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone.

The Legend of Barney Thompson is on general release